The emergence of antibiotic resistant strains along with the increasing public
health concern regarding infectious diseases and hospital-acquired infections has led to
the necessity of finding viable alternatives to antibiotics.
Nature has been a source of compounds with interesting medicinal properties for
millennia. For many decades, natural products have been a wealthy source of
antimicrobials and more recently academic drug discovery in this research area has
been accentuated, though pharmaceutical industries devote fewer resources to
antimicrobial drug discovery programs, in comparison with their investment several
decades ago.
Though, initially, the developments in drug discovery were aimed towards synthetic
chemical libraries, nowadays they are also greatly used in the research of bioactive
natural products, in order to keep up with the developments in similar areas. Moreover,
these developments allowed to overcome several problems associated with natural
products drug discovery by using molecular techniques (i.e. genome mining) when
organisms are not cultivable on the laboratorial environment.
In this chapter, various examples of natural products with antimicrobial properties from
marine organisms and plants are referred, highlighting their important and promising
results against pathogenic bacteria, fungi, viruses and protozoa.
Keywords: Antibacterial, Antibiotics, Antifungal, Antiprotozoal, Antiviral,
Bacteria, Bioactive molecules, Drug discovery, Fungi, Infectious diseases, Marine
organisms, Natural products, Pathogenic microorganisms, Plants, Secondary
metabolite.
